


An alcoholic artist, a tuberculosis survivor, and the metaphysical concept of revolution walk into a bar

by particolored_socks



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Meta Analysis, Meta Essay, Nonfiction, Originally Posted on Tumblr, but I promise you it will make sense, the broship you never knew you needed, weird combination of characters? yes absolutely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 16:25:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16896006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/particolored_socks/pseuds/particolored_socks
Summary: Mini meta essay on how Grantaire and Fantine are actually kind of similar, despite their surface differences.





	An alcoholic artist, a tuberculosis survivor, and the metaphysical concept of revolution walk into a bar

**Author's Note:**

> It’s not Fantine Week anymore but that doesn’t mean I’m not eternally thinking about Fantine so *fingerguns* here we go.

“I only understand love and liberty” is something that Grantaire says but it might as well be Fantine’s motto too because let’s be real here, these people come at it from different directions but they come to the same conclusion.

 

Grantaire is a student, or a former student by the time 1832 rolls around; he’s Bossuet’s age, which I think comes to 4 years older than Enjolras, which puts him at a solid age 30 at the barricade, 26 when Marius meets the ensemble at the Musain. In his debut, which is to say his introduction in a scene versus a description by Hugo, he gives a grand declamation which takes up over five pages. I tried reading the whole thing in French and my eyes glazed over; in English it’s little better, if more decipherable since it’s my native language. Friends, Grantaire is verbose. But we can gather a few things from his long-ass rant:

  * That he apprenticed under Gros, a painter of the time, and stole the apples he was supposed to have been drawing from still life (presumably ate them too). What we can take from this is that he is from a wealthy enough family to devote his time to learning how to paint, rather than a trade, e.g. Feuilly.


  * That he believes virtue can easily turn into vice, saying almost the same thing in dialogue as a throwaway line that Hugo said in description about Javert when he got his terrible St. Michael on while arresting Valjean in M-sur-M. (He also, in a single throwaway line – the Hapgood translation is “a bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous than the asp and the cobra” – sums up Fantine’s entire awful fate.)


  * That he is probably not an atheist, but definitely isn’t on board with the idea of an all-knowing all-powerful all-merciful god.


  * That a big part of why he believes this is because he sees how the world suffers. He has studied history and sees the way it repeats itself; he gives several classical examples and compares them to the contemporary history of his day. He also gives a statistic (how accurate it is I couldn’t tell you) about the number of deaths from hunger in a single neighborhood of London. He uses this as a reason to condemn all of England.



In short: Grantaire is a skeptic, yes, but as the saying goes: a skeptic is only a bitterly disappointed optimist.

Grantaire does not believe in the revolution because he does not think humankind has the ability to rise from its present miserable condition, and he does not think it has the will to rise from that condition either.

(At this point in time, he’s wrong about the first part, but tragically right about the second. And it’s the second one that’s the kicker.)

Fantine was a gamine and a grisette. She was as Musichetta is; the difference is that Joly probably would actually marry Musichetta, and we all know how Tholomyès worked out for Fantine. (Poorly.) Fantine was a gutter kid, who worked for her living. Given an alt canon where she survives 1823 and makes it to Paris with Valjean and Cosette (age 36 at the barricade), we can assume the following:

  * That while she has a comfortable place in the Fauchelevent household, she will probably still be doing much of the sewing and upkeep; Louison would likely take a much smaller role. She can teach Cosette about coquetry and fashion, she can show Cosette a little about upper society, but she cannot be part of that society any longer. She is masquerading as the shy retiring wife to a shy retiring man. Theater, the arts, et cetera, these are all faded memories carefully preserved in her mind. Any indulgences the Fauchelevents take are pretty much relegated to walks in the Luxembourg gardens.


  * That she has been through hell and back, and knows intrinsically both the good and the evil that every man is capable of. Jean Valjean in particular encapsulates this: when she knew him as Mayor Madeleine, he was both an angel and the very devil. So the inherent goodness of man is a complicated thing for her. Perhaps some people are simply born wicked, but certainly some have wickedness thrust upon them. (Yes, I know that’s from Wicked, yes, I know the original Shakespeare quote is a dick joke, yes, I got it, yes, Grantaire would laugh his ass off at this, yes. However. Still kinda true.)


  * That even after going through the worst hell a human can imagine, she still believes not only that there is a god but that he is good. We know this in particular because there is a bit of dialogue when she is in the hospital where she is planning what sort of confirmation dress little Cosette is going to wear.


  * That seeing students on the street talking of barricades and rebellion would make her hackles rise like those of a cornered wolf. Fantine was born in 1796, just two years after the Reign of Terror ended. She grew up watching Napoleon’s rise to power, she grew up watching the wars, she was a young woman for the Bourbon Restoration. She knows what revolutions do: she is a product of one. We can reasonably extrapolate from Hugo’s introduction of her character that the revolution is why she has no family and why she grew up as a gutter kid, but again: she grew up watching  _everything_.



So Fantine knows, has known from birth, how unfair the world is.

Does she want the world to be better? Well, sure. But while she knows that individuals can change for the better, she also knows from experience that The People generally don’t.

Grantaire and Fantine having a conversation about belief and revolution would be an interesting one, I think.

… and now I want to write a fic about it. Damn it.


End file.
